RESOURCE LIBRARY

ACC contributed data to this comprehensive report on wildlife dispersal areas and migratory corridors in Kenya’s rangeland and coastal terrestrial ecosystems. It identifies and maps wildlife habitat connectivity and associated conservation issues and concerns. It also recommends strategies for securing dispersal areas and migratory corridors for the future.

Surveys conducted across sections of the pastoral Maasai of Kenya show a wide variety of values for wildlife, ranging from utility and medicinal uses to environmental indicators, commerce, and tourism. Attitudes toward wildlife are highly variable, depending on perceived threats and uses. Large carnivores and herbivores pose the greatest threats to people, livestock, and crops, but also have many positive values. Attitudes vary with gender, age, education, and land holding, but most of all with the source of livelihood and location, which bears on relative abundance of useful and threatening species. Traditional pastoral practices and cultural views that accommodated coexistence between livestock and wildlife are dwindling and being replaced by new values and sensibilities as pastoral practices give way to new livelihoods, lifestyles, and aspirations. Human-wildlife conflict has grown with the transition from mobile pastoralism to sedentary livelihoods. Unless the new values offset the loss of traditional values, wildlife will continue to decline. New wildlife-based livelihoods show that continued coexistence is possible despite the changes underway.

1. Fencing is one of the most common methods of mitigating human-wildlife conflicts. At the same time, fencing is considered one of the most pressing threats emerging in conservation globally. Although fences act as barriers and can cause population isolation and fragmentation over time, it is difficult to quantitatively predict the consequences fences have for wildlife.

2. Here, we model how fencing designed to mitigate human-elephant conflict (HEC) on the Borderlands between Kenya and Tanzania will affect functional connectivity and movement corridors for African elephants. Specifically, we (a) model functional landscape connectivity integrating natural and anthropogenic factors; (b) predict seasonal movement corridors used by elephants in non-protected areas; and (c) evaluate whether fencing in one area can potentially intensify human-wildlife conflicts elsewhere.

3. We used GPS movement and remote sensing data to develop monthly step-selection functions to model functional connectivity. For future scenarios, we used an ongoing fencing project designed for HEC mitigation within the study area. We modelled movement corridors using least-cost path and circuit theory methods, evaluated their predictive power and quantified connectivity changes resulting from the planned fencing.

4. Our results suggest that fencing will not cause landscape fragmentation and will not change functional landscape connectivity dramatically. However, fencing will lead to a loss of connectivity locally and will increase the potential for HEC in new areas. We estimate that wetlands, important for movement corridors, will be more intensively used by the elephants, which may also cause problems of overgrazing. Seasonal analysis highlights an increasing usage of non-protected lands in the dry season and equal importance of the pinch point wetlands for preserving overall function connectivity

5. Synthesis and applications. Fencing is a solution to small-scale human-elephant conflict problems but will not solve the issue at a broader scale. Moreover, our results highlight that it may intensify the conflicts and overuse of habitat patches in other areas, thereby negating conservation benefits. If fencing is employed on a broader scale, then it is imperative that corridors are integrated within protected area networks to ensure local connectivity of affected species.

Landscape connectivity is an important component of systematic conservation planning. Step-selection functions (SSFs) is a highly promising method for connectivity modeling. However, differences in movement behavior across individuals and seasons are usually not considered in current SSF-based analyses, potentially leading to imprecise connectivity models. Here, our objective was to use SSFs to build functional connectivity models for African elephants Loxodonta africana in a seasonal environment to illustrate the temporal variability of functional landscape connectivity.

We provide a methodological framework for integrating detected interindividual variability into resistance surface modeling, for assessing how landscape connectivity changes across seasons, and for evaluating how seasonal connectivity differences affect predictions of movement corridors. Using radio-tracking data from elephants in the Borderland area between Kenya and Tanzania, we applied SSFs to create seasonal landscape resistance surfaces. Based on seasonal models, we predicted movement corridors connecting major protected areas (PAs) using circuit theory and least-cost path analysis. Our findings demonstrate that individual variability and seasonality lead to substantial changes in landscape connectivity and predicted movement corridors. Specifically, we show that the models disregarding seasonal resource fluctuations underestimate connectivity for the wet and transitional seasons, and overestimate connectivity for the dry season. Based on our seasonal models, we predicted a connectivity network between large PAs and highlight seasonal and consistent patterns that are most important for effective management planning. Our findings reveal that elephant movements in the borderland between Kenya and Tanzania are essential for maintaining connectivity in the dry season, and that existing corridors do not protect these movements in full extent.

Kenya is endowed with rich natural capital and biodiversity. Its diverse landscapes range from the Chalbi Desert in the north to the snow-clad peaks of Mt. Kenya, from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the shores of Lake Victoria, and from the rolling plains of Maasai Mara to the floor of the Great Rift Valley. The interactions between topography, soils, hydrology, plants, animals and peoples within each eco-climatic zone create locally distinctive ecosystems, including different types of forests, woodlands, shrublands, grass-lands, deserts, wetlands, lakes and rivers, mon-tane, afro-alpine and marine ecosystems. Kenya, ranks among the world’s richest biodiversity nations and hosts over 35,000 species, including more than 7000 plant species and many endemic, rare, endangered and threatened species.

Kenya is endowed with rich natural capital and biodiversity. Its diverse landscapes range from the Chalbi Desert in the north to the snow-clad peaks of Mt. Kenya, from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the shores of Lake Victoria, and from the rolling plains of Maasai Mara to the floor of the Great Rift Valley. The interactions between topography, soils, hydrology, plants, animals and peoples within each eco-climatic zone create locally distinctive ecosystems, including different types of forests, woodlands, shrublands, grass-lands, deserts, wetlands, lakes and rivers, mon-tane, afro-alpine and marine ecosystems. Kenya, ranks among the world’s richest biodiversity nations and hosts over 35,000 species, including more than 7000 plant species and many endemic, rare, endangered and threatened species.

Kenya is endowed with rich natural capital and biodiversity. Its diverse landscapes range from the Chalbi Desert in the north to the snow-clad peaks of Mt. Kenya, from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the shores of Lake Victoria, and from the rolling plains of Maasai Mara to the floor of the Great Rift Valley. The interactions between topography, soils, hydrology, plants, animals and peoples within each eco-climatic zone create locally distinctive ecosystems, including different types of forests, woodlands, shrublands, grass-lands, deserts, wetlands, lakes and rivers, mon-tane, afro-alpine and marine ecosystems. Kenya, ranks among the world’s richest biodiversity nations and hosts over 35,000 species, including more than 7000 plant species and many endemic, rare, endangered and threatened species.

Kenya is endowed with rich natural capital and biodiversity. Its diverse landscapes range from the Chalbi Desert in the north to the snow-clad peaks of Mt. Kenya, from the white beaches of the Indian Ocean to the shores of Lake Victoria, and from the rolling plains of Maasai Mara to the floor of the Great Rift Valley. The interactions between topography, soils, hydrology, plants, animals and peoples within each eco-climatic zone create locally distinctive ecosystems, including different types of forests, woodlands, shrublands, grass-lands, deserts, wetlands, lakes and rivers, mon-tane, afro-alpine and marine ecosystems. Kenya, ranks among the world’s richest biodiversity nations and hosts over 35,000 species, including more than 7000 plant species and many endemic, rare, endangered and threatened species.

Conserving Elephants in the Tanzania-Kenya Borderlands, 2012 (pdf): Cross-border collaboration is vital for conserving the large elephant population in Tanzania-Kenya borderlands and connecting the fragmented herds spread among the many national parks, reserves and community wildlife areas in the region.The borderlands elephant population is the best studied and most famous in all Africa and a key attraction in the $1.3 billion tourism industry of Tanzania and Kenya.

WESTERN, D. (2005) The Ecology and Changes of the Amboseli Ecosystem – Recommendations for Planning and Conservation, Unpublished Report submitted to the Science and Planning Committee of the Amboseli Task Force.

2009 Western, D. The Future of Maasailand, its People and Wildlife. In Staying Maasai. Livelihoods, Conservation and Development in East African Rangelands. Editors K. Holmewood, P. Kristjanson and P. Trench. Springer, New York.

2009 Western, D Groom, R and Worden, J. The Impact of Land Subdivision and Sedentarization of Pastoralist on Wildlife in an African Savanna Ecosystem. Biological Conservation 142: 2538-2546.

2010 Western, D. People, Elephants and Habitat in a Amboseli National Park: A Century of Change Detected by Repeat Photography. In Repeat Photography: Methods and Applications in the Geological and Ecological Sciences. Ed. R.H. Webb, Boyer, D.E. and Turner, R.M. Island Press, Washington, D.C.